The principal tasks of a system administrator or a company's Information Technology (IT) department are to configure and deploy computer systems (e.g., personal computers, servers, etc.) and to repair computer systems when they fail. With respect to computer systems such as servers, the system administrators typically have to install the operating system and configure each service offered by the operating system (e.g., name service based on DNS (domain name service), etc.) Each service is typically dependent on (or impacts) another service provided by the operating system. Thus, when the administrator is configuring a service on a new server, the administrator typically manually configures one service at a time and checks to ensure that the configuration of the particular service does not negatively impact the other services offered by the operating system.
If an incorrect configuration change is applied the system may fail to start. Alternatively, if a partial configuration change is read by a service currently executing on the server, the executing service may abort. In an effort to aid the administrator in efficiently restarting a server after an incorrect configuration change, many modern operating systems include functionality to take and store a snapshot of the server. The snapshot typically corresponds to the boot configuration of the entire system recorded during the last successful booting of the server. Thus, if the administrator makes an incorrect configuration change, the administrator may in effect “undo” the incorrect configuration by reverting back to the configuration of the last successful boot of system (i.e., the configuration stored in the snapshot).